The Sharp Centre
for Design, Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, Alsop
Architects Ltd., and Robbie/Young + Wright Architects

By Carter B. Horsley

The first volume in a new series by Princeton
Architectural Press entitled As Built, "Details in Contemporary
Architecture" highlights 24 interesting projects in the United
States and one in Canada that were completed in the past two years.

In her preface, editor Christine Killory notes
that "popular interest in architecture and the celebrity
of architects has intensified in this media saturated age, but
serious publications devoted to architecture are disappearing,
while the quality of many that remain has declined."

Ms. Killory goes on to state that:

"Whenever American architects gather in
numbers ther are ritual lamentations about architecture's loss
of respect, power, and influence, for which it is fair to say
architects themselves have been largely responsible. The last
fifty years have witnessed a systematic retreat at all levels
of the profession as vast areas of the built landscape became
architect-free zones, new materials technologies, building types,
and profound social change went unacknowledged, and market share
was lost to cannier, more pragmatic players. To lessen legal exposure,
architects became cautious and risk-averse, demoting themselves
from supervisors to observers on the job site. Some prominent
architects assumed responsibility for the preliminary design of
their projects only, staying on as project consultants but leaving
the onerous, exacting, labor-intensive disciplines of construction
documents, contract administration, and project delivery to others.
As they became more preoccupied with architecture's scenographic
qualities and responsive to noisy popular media, architects learned
to market their work based on its value as image or entertainment,
even as the overall quality of American buildings declined. Many
abandoned the mundane purposefulness of everyday life altogether
for the postmodern theory swamps, or virtual worlds where passion
for architecture can be severed form reality. On many dysfunctional
building teams, architects focus mainly on design while engineers,
consultants, and contractors have little interest in it, if any....American
building culture - traditionally risk averse, conservative, and
confrontational - has lately shown signs of greater openness to
material innovation and more collaborative relationships. As it
has everywhere else, the digital revolution has forever changed
America architectural design, practice, construction technology,
buildings, and drawings. Whereas in the past architects translated
an imagined three-dimensional conception of a building into two-dimensional
drawings, they now create a computer model of the concept and
generate the two-dimensional document required to build it....While
many architects first turned to computers to realize new forms,
they now recognize that by expanding their knowledge base and
taking on additonal risk, they can begin to regain control of
the building process....Over a third of the projects included
in this first issue of AsBuilt are by architecture firms
who have main offices in other countries, or principals who were
born and trained overseas and have to come to American to practice....The
shortcoming of American building practices have recently been
the focus of unflattering comparisons with those of Europe and
Japan, but there isn't another country on earth that has so many
foreign architects working on commissions of every size. As a
result America is getter better architecture, greater access to
more sophisticated technology and materials, and building construction
is held to an increasing higher standard."

This is a non-nonsense book about a lot of
sensational and wonderful projects that is filled with fabulous
photographs and drawings and good technical commentary. If the
book has a fault, it is that it makes little effort to put the
selected projects in their design context, but that is not a major
fault as the projects' importance is generally self-evident.

The most spectacular project, which, not surprisingly,
is the cover illustration of the book is the Sharp Centre for
Design in Toronto that was designed by Alsop Architects Ltd. of
London and Robbie/Young + Wright Architects Inc. of Toronto.

The project is an addition to the Ontario College
of Art and Design (OCAD) and it is elevated on 12 steel columns
eight stories off the ground and its two stories of art studios,
lecture theaters, exhibition spaces and faculty offices hovers
over existing brick structures. The void under the elevated structure
provides outdoor expansion space for the college.

The addition is supported by six pairs of tapering
steel legs that the editors note "touch the ground in an
apparently random fashion." It is also supported by a conventional
concrete stair and elevator core. "Like all exposed steel
in the Sharp Centre, the legs are covered with many coats of intumescent
paint, a fire-proofing material that swells when exposed to intense
heat, increasing in volume and decreasing in density, to provide
a protective cushion around each leg. Although all the legs are
the same size, seven are multicolored and five are finished in
black to make them appear thinner, an even more persuasive optical
illusion at night when the black legs become less visible and
seem to disappear; the architects wanted the building to have
a completely different nighttime look....As a cost-saving measure,
what was intended to be a multicolored translucent cladding is
instead a corrugated aluminum skin painted in black and white
to resemble pixilation, a visual effect intended to blur the scale
of the building and affect the way is perceived," the editors
maintained.

The building harkens back to the great walking
cities of Archigram, which were rather ungainly, and its bright
colors convey a pleasant sense of humor and, given its elevation,
levity.

The Sharp Centre is spectacular and significant
because it suggests that there are meaningful and excellent ways
to build over older, nay, historic, structures and hopefully it
will begin to influence the nasty and often unsophisticated community
debates.

It is amazing how many "roof-top additions"
there are in Manhattan and how poorly done most of them are, especially
now that we have this fanciful and fine example to emulate.

The book does illustrate the Greenwich Street
Project at 497 Greenwich Street in Manhattan that was designed
by Winka Dubbeldam of Archi-tectonic. It is an "up-and-over"
roof-top addition in that it consists of a new 11-story building
those wavy glass facade extends over the top of an adjacent six-story
former warehouse whose red-brick facade is retained. "Asymmetrical
waves of glass move diagonally across the facade following the
sloping profile of the setback angle....Awning windows hinged
at the top in the glass wall satisfy a code-related ventilation
requirement for residential buildings," the editors observed.

The Greenwich Street Project is relatively
modest but was one of the first of a new wave of interesting modern
small size buildings in TriBeCa, SoHo, the Lower East Side and
Chelsea that indicated that architecture was again alive in New
York. It is quite remarkable that such a sophisticated project
could have been completed near the beginning of the current design
renaissance in Manhattan.

Chicago, of course, has many landmarks but
also a lot of very unattractive new skyscrapers that make some
pedestrian New York office buildings look good. On the other hand,
Chicago has Millennium Park and its Pritzker Pavilion by Frank
O. Gehry that gives the city a cerebral, cultural heart like New
York's Lewisohn Stadium at the City College of New York that served
as the city's major summer cultural center for decades until it
was demolished for an uninspired megastructure academic building.

The editors provide the following commentary
about the BP Bridge, Pritzker Pavilion and Great Lawn at Millennium
Park by Gehry Partners LLP of Los Angeles:

"Chicago's Millennium Park is 16.5 acres
and built over existing and expanded rail lines, bus lanes and
two new parking levels. The open area includes the four-thousand
seat Pritzker Pavilion, the Great Lawn with space for an audience
of an additional seven thousand people, and the BP Bridge, all
designed by Gehry Partners with structural engineering by SOM.
The BP Bridge spans Columbus Drive to link Millennium Park with
Daley Bicentennial Plaza and park land on lake-front areas to
the east. The 925-foot-long serpentine bridge provides view of
the Chicago skyline, Millennium Park, and Grant Park along the
shores of Lake Michigan. The extra length made possible by the
bridge's sinuous curves allows for an overall slope of five percent,
facilitating easy access and a comfortable path of travel for
the physically challenged, while affording a shifting series of
perspectives of Millennium Park and the Chicago skyline. The bridge
has a concrete and steel support structure and spans the roadway
wth a single supporting column. Its sharply angled side sections
effectively minimize the overall appearance of the structure;
Clad in more than nine thousand brushed stainless steel panels
with an ipe hardwood deck, the BP Bridge acts as an acoustic barrier
for the traffic noise on Columbis Drive and Michican Avenue on
the west side of the park. The great lawn is covered by a three-dimensional
trellis of stainless steel, which supports lighting and many of
nearly two hundred speakers positioned throughout the pavilion
and lawn, efficiently amplifying sound without blocking views
of the stage. The Great Lawn itself includes 95,000 square feet
of reinforced natural turf lawn designed for extreme traffic use
and runoff recovery through use of emerging turf technology,and
a layered high performance drainage system. Because the structural
deck was designed to support 4 feet of growing medium, the planting
design is not limited to the grid of the structural columns in
the parking garage below The result is varying profiles of growing
medium with sand drainage project ranging in depth from 8 inches
of 4 feet deep. The entire deck was waterproofed with a hot-applied
rubberized membrane system. Styrofoam fill was used to create
landforms, which do not exceed the designed load capacity of the
structural deck. Two reinforced concrete cast-in-place garages
support most of the roof deck, while a combination of steel structure
and precast concrete structure teesspan the railroad tracks."

The Pritzker Pavilion is one of the most successful
of Gehry's twisted ribbon-like shiny designs and the bridge is
very fine. The trellis, however, seems rather archaic or primitive
in the context of the pavilion and bridge but it serves an important
purpose.

The site for the South Mountain Community College
Performing Arts Center in Phoenix borders the world's largest
municipal park, South Mountain Park Preserve. The design by Jones
Studio Inc. of Phoenix is a rather subtle interweaving of seemingly
random linearity that has a lot of the elegance of some designs
by Herzog & de Meuron.

The book's entry for this project noted that
"the challenge of the site was to integrate the rich textures
of the surrounding landscape - palo verdes, brittlebush, and gravel
- into the new construction. The design team decided to produce
an abstract box that would somehow change over the course of the
day, using the college's philosophy of training students to recognize
aspects of everyday life as performance opportuniities to develop
the building concept. The performance hall, including the exterior
lobby, house, and stage, is sited near the main entrance to the
campus. The elevatored exterior lobby, constructed of aluminum
grating and galvanized purlins, puts members of the audience on
stage before and after performances; lit like a lantern it announces
to the community that an event is in progress. The building is
made up of two separate boxes: an outer box covered with rusted
metal and glass,and an inner box that contains the theater itself.
The lobby and circulation spaces occur in the space between. The
building is constucted of sandblasted concrete masonry units with
the exception of the screen in front of the performance hall,
which is steel-framed and clad in overlapping weathering steel
profiles that gradually peel away to reveal glazing in areas where
light locks are not required. Like the needles of a saguaro cactus,
the layered folds of the steel sections act like louvers to dissipate
heat, shade wall surfaces, and provide a tough outer shell for
the snesitive area within, the sound chamber."

A horizontality that is somewhat similar to
that of the South Mountain Community College Performing Arts Center
in Phoenix is evident in the design of the Caltrans District 7
Headquarters in Los Angeles, but it is a cooler and more high-tech
style.

"Although no windows are visible,"
the book's entry on the project maintains, "there are many
windows hidden by the building's most distinctive element, a scrim
wall with blue-gray coated perforated aluminim panels and operable
windows, which are covered by a mechanical skin of many moving
parts, alternately open or close as they respond to changing temperature
and light levels. Some of the three-dimensional panels are fixed,
but over a thousand others open and close automatically, controlled
by computerized light and temperature sensors on the west side
of the building in the morning and on the east side in the afternoon...."

Seattle (Washington)
Public Library, Office for Metropolitan Architecture of Rotterdam,
Netherlands, and LMN Architects of Seattle

If the Sharp Center for Design is the most
sensational new project in Canada, then the Seattle Public Library
in Washington by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture and
LMN Architects is the most sensational in the United States, a
vertiginous, bulging, explosive and energetic project that makes
some of Gehry's designs seem tame. It does not have the poetic,
sail-like beauty of Gehry's recent IAC headquarters for Barry
Diller on West Street in Manhattan, but it brings a new sense
of monumentality to urban architecture far beyond its relatively
modest size.

The book provides the following commentary:

"The twelve-story, 362,987-square-foot
Seattle Public Library sits on a steep urban site with a 29-foot
height differential between its boundaries on Fourth and Fifth
Avenues. The library's distinctive exterior skin, a steel, glass,
and aluminum diamond-shaped grid, began with the simple concept
of wrapping the entire building in a continous layer of transparency.
This layer, with its faceted planes, outlines the elevated platforms
on the exterior while creating a variety of inter-connected spaces
on the interior....Integral to the design development of the curtain
wall was the envelope's thermal performance. except for the roof,
louvers, and exposed concrete foundation walls, the exterior envelope
is comprised entirely of vision glass. This posed a considerable
challenge to the design team given the current energy codes and
the level of thermal performance the curtain-wall system would
be required to achieve. The entire envelope, including all of
its component parts, was included in the energy calculations.
To help meet the required performance level, appoximately half
of the insulated glazing panels were fabricated with airspaces
containing krypton gas and newly developed high performance low-E
coatings. In addition, to combat increased solar heat gain experienced
during the summer months, an aluminum expanded metal mesh interlayer
was chosen for the glass panels receiving the most sun. The mesh's
mini louvers provided a shielding of direct sun as well as views
to the exterior though the mesh. Ideal for shading, the microdiamond
pattern of the metal mesh also mimics the large diamond pattern
of the curtain-wall mullions....To clean the expanses of exterior
glass, a process inspired by mountain climbing is used. Traditional
outriggers at the roof of the building allow window washers to
descend each elevation from top to bottom on bosun chairs. while
the skylight and vertical facades are scaled more easily the underslung
surfaces require additional measures to reach the glass. Stainless-steel
eyebolts, which protrude through the mullion body and top and
spaced at close intervals. Each eyebolt is attached back to seismic
steel members, providing load-carying capacity. Window washers
use carabiners to connect to these eybolts in order to pull themselves
within reach of the glass."

A renovation of the Bengt Sjostrom Starlight
Theater at Rock Valley College in Rockville, Illinois, required
a three-year, three-phase project that was designed by Studio
Gang Architects of Chicago. It is relatively small project but
extremely well executed and quite exciting.

"The first phase, completed in 2001, expanded
the seating bowl from around six hundred to almost eleven hundred
seats," according to its entry in the book, "and created
a curving, 18-foot-high concrete structure at the back of the
theater house new bathrooms and ticket booths. The second phase,
finished in 2003, consisted of an addition housing a 50-foot -tall
fly tower and a proscenium stage house with sliding transluscent
doors. A cooper-clad steel frame proscenium with 30-foot-high
translucent all-weather doors faces the open-air seating bowl.
For the third phase, completed in 2003, the architect worked with
Uni-Systems, a Minneapolis-based firm specializing in moving structures,
to create a kinetic, faceted roof that consists of triangular
stainless steel-clad panels supported by stell columns and trusses.
When the roof opens, six of its panels rise in succession to form
a six-pointed star revealing the sky. The theater's multi-pitched
canopy has a lower fixed section of twenty panels 100 square feet
in plan, and surrounds a higher 90-ton movable assembly over the
seating area, a hexagon in plan with forty-foot sides, and six
triangular panels that cantilever from steel trusses bearing on
free-standing columns. ....When closed, audience members see a
hexagonal pitched roof. As the roof opens, each panel rotates
up in sequence, in a clockwise motion over fifty-four degrees
about the perimeter, quietly and quickly in just over twelve minutes
There are no visible clues that indicate how the roof moves....The
unusal design required that the roof components be installed in
reverse order."

University of
Chicago Graduate School of Business, Chicago, Rafael Vinoly Architects
PC, New York

The old Penn Station that was demolished in
Manhattan in the 1960s was most notable for its great skylit waiting
room and plans to build a new replacement in a stodgy old post
office facility across from Madison Square Garden fail to capture
the vaulting character of the great spaces of the original station.
One project, unfortunately not in New York, that comes quite close
in spirit and space is Rafael Vinoly's design for the Graduate
School of Business at the University of Chicago.

"The University of Chicago campus,"
the book notes, "is organized around a sequence of quads
that gives the institution its remarkable character - the architecture
of the unversity is renowned for both its stylistic consistency
and the quality of its public rooms....The program had to...fit
into an architecturally significant location bordering Frank Lloyd
Wright's prairie-style Frederick C. Robie House and Bertram Goodhue's
gothic Rockefeller Chapel. The design for the Graduate School
of Business makes the quad a public room enclosed in a winter
garden, a six-story glass atrium that can be used year-round and
functions as the main ceremonial space of the school. Natural
light from the Winter Garden reaches the interior of the building
through a ring of triple-height spaces surrounded by study rooms.
Three circulation cores surrounding the Winter Garden connect
all the levels of the building or use by the students, faculty,
and the public at large....Cantilevered floors and horizontal
limestone details on the facade are a nod to the building's celebrated
neighbor [Robie]. Curved steel beams that form Gothic arches -
a key design motif of campus architecture and a major visual element
of the Rockefeller Chapel - support the glazed roof of the Winter
Garden. The roof is formed by quadriparite point vaults of tubular
steel that transfer loads and forces through very thin structural
members, an efficient structure that maximizes its transparency....The
convex surface of the glass ceiling accelerates the convection
of hot air toward the top of the space where it is then exhausted,
allowing the room to be naturally ventilated throught the year.
Mechanical shades shield the space below from heat gain and glare,
and the flaring cylindrical forms of the columns resemble the
silhouettes of trees in a garden. The funneled shapes of the roof
vaults draw rainwater into and through the hollow centers of each
of the four structural columns, then into a reservoir: Blair Kamin,
architecture crtic at The Chciago Tribune, described them
as the world's most beautiful gutters."